Anneke Kampman: An Endless Archive

About

San Mei Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by London-based artist Anneke Kampman. Working as both an artist and a musician, her practice moves between text, sound, music and image, analysing how the culture industries (re)produce personality for profit, addressing issues of standardisation, reproduction and artistic autonomy within the global circulation of pop music. Anneke Kampman’s works operate as theories, fictions, or framing devices, drawing from her own experiences as a musician alongside engagements with German critical theory, institutional critique, and popular culture, re-staging the aesthetic techniques of the culture industries in an immanent critique of pop.

At San Mei Gallery, Kampman brings together a series of works exploring the formal qualities and politics of contemporary music-video. Interested in how music-video brings together divergent cultural forms – sound, image and commodity – into a single container, Kampman understands the music-video both as a repository for overlapping histories and contradictory forces and as an aperture beyond the sum of its parts, a kaleidoscope of deferred combinations that are brought to life by the spectator.

At the centre of the exhibition, Kampman’s video Baby-G (2023) explores the fragmented history of Casio’s iconic Baby-G, launched in 1994 as a line of women’s watches, “the vibrant, active, stylish little sister of the masculine, unbreakable G-SHOCK” as described by the film’s narrator. In a refracted and syncopated narrative that blurs the division between essay film and music-video, Kampman excavates the affective and material histories of these everyday time-keeping devices within the spread of information capitalism. Presented throughout the exhibition are an archive of cheap commodities, including a series of poker chips cast using the unsold vinyl remainder of Kampman’s own musical past. Kampman looks to these everyday objects as departure points for fantastical explorations of wider social histories and vernacular practices of production, circulation and consumption.

Anneke Kampman (b. 1986, Edinburgh) is an artist and musician working across writing, performance, music and moving image. Her recent work explores the politics and multivalent histories of popular music’s global circulation via visual media such as the music-video. She is currently completing a practice-led PhD at the School of Art under the supervision of Jon Thomson, David Burrows, and Benedict Drew. Her work has been presented at LUX Artist Moving Image Festival, Tramway, Glasgow; Pump House Gallery, London; South London Gallery; Glasgow International Festival; Jerwood Space, London; Somerset House, London; La Monnaie De Munt, Brussels; Café Oto, London; Mayday Rooms, London; Filmhuis Cavia, Amsterdam; Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, and BBC Tectonics Festival. Kampman lives and works in London and her work is always in conversation with the dreary vistas of her childhood, growing up in the Scottish borders.